Fox Entertainment and Kevin Hart's Hartbeat launch a microdrama-to-TV pipeline

FOX Entertainment and Kevin Hart's media company Hartbeat announced a multi-part partnership on Tuesday that treats short, phone-sized video series as a testing ground for future films and television shows, the latest sign that vertical "microdrama" has moved from a mobile-app novelty into a formal development pipeline for a legacy broadcaster.

Under the agreement, detailed in a joint announcement issued Tuesday, FOX Entertainment Studios secures first-look rights to develop feature films and television series out of vertical series released under three Hartbeat-affiliated labels: Codeblack, Essence and Revolt. FOX Entertainment Global, the company's distribution arm, will then take the vertical series themselves to international markets once each title finishes its initial run on its home platform.

The numbers

The pipeline opens with 25 live-action titles spanning thriller, drama and faith-based storytelling, all set to premiere on a new, dedicated Codeblack-branded channel built inside My Drama, the vertical-video app operated by Fox's technology partner Holywater Tech. It is the first branded destination of its kind on the platform, and viewers will be able to subscribe to it on its own or reach it through the broader My Drama service.

Codeblack, Essence and Revolt together claim a combined social-media following above 20 million, a built-in audience the companies are counting on to seed the new channel from its first day. Holywater Tech, for its part, says its stable of apps — which also includes the book-publishing platform My Passion and the AI-assisted series platform My Muse — reaches more than 100 million users worldwide. The company has separately estimated, in a report with the consultancy Owl & Co., that the global vertical-video market outside China will generate roughly $150 billion in 2026, up 41 percent from a year earlier, with dedicated microdrama apps accounting for a comparatively small slice of about $4 billion of that total.

How Fox got here

The deal extends a buildout that Hartbeat, the company Kevin Hart and Jeff Clanagan formed in 2022 by merging Hart's Laugh Out Loud and HartBeat Productions businesses with a $100 million investment from the private equity firm Abry Partners, has been pursuing across several platforms this year. Hartbeat struck a first-look film deal with Fox Corp.-owned Tubi in October 2025 for a slate of creator-driven movies, including the supernatural feature "Sundown." Last month it signed a separate vertical-microseries partnership with the platform aTwist, lining up more than 20 original microseries under Hartbeat's LOL comedy banner, including adaptations of novels by the author Blake Karrington. Tuesday's announcement folds Fox proper, rather than just its streaming arm, into that strategy, and does so specifically through Codeblack, the Hartbeat-owned label built around Black film and television audiences, alongside the culture-media brands Essence and Revolt.

For Fox Entertainment, the Hartbeat tie-up is one node in a wider push to treat vertical video as an early-stage research and development layer for its linear and streaming businesses. The company took an equity stake in Holywater Tech roughly a year ago and has since committed to producing more than 200 vertical titles for My Drama, struck a similar vertical-microdrama slate with the YouTube creator Dhar Mann, taken an equity position in the experiential-storytelling company Chain, acquired the scripted-podcast studio Meet Cute, and added a first-look book-to-screen arrangement with HarperCollins' Avon imprint. The logic in each case is the same: let audiences vote with their attention on short, cheap-to-produce episodes, then move the ones that work into costlier film and television formats where Fox already controls distribution. Hartbeat, for its part, gets a direct line into a broadcaster's development and international sales machine for IP that originates entirely outside the traditional pitch-and-pilot process.

Who is involved

The partnership was announced by Hannah Pillemer, head of scripted at FOX Entertainment Studios, and Jeff Clanagan, the Codeblack founder who also serves as Hartbeat's president and chief distribution officer. Holywater Tech's co-founders and co-chief executives, Anatolii Kasianov and Bogdan Nesvit, represented the technology side of the arrangement, which runs through Revolt, the culture-focused media brand, and Essence, the Essence Communications-owned publication aimed at Black women, in addition to Codeblack.

"Vertical is where those stories start, not where they stop. The culture builds the audience, the audience chooses the stories, and with FOX the stories that win become film and television for the world," Clanagan said in the companies' announcement.

Pillemer framed the arrangement in similar terms from Fox's side. "This partnership gives us an opportunity to identify bold ideas in the vertical space, see what resonates in real time, and give those stories a path to grow into film and television," she said, adding that the approach "fits naturally with how we're growing FOX Entertainment Studios." Kasianov and Nesvit, in a joint statement, called the new Codeblack channel "an exciting next step for My Drama" as the platform looks to deepen ties between established media brands and their audiences.

What happens next

None of the parties disclosed the deal's financial terms, and the companies did not give a premiere date for the first of the 25 titles or say how Fox Entertainment Studios will decide which vertical series earn a shot at television or theatrical development. Trade coverage of the announcement noted that the arrangement extends vertical storytelling beyond the romance-heavy catalog that has dominated the format to date, pushing instead into multicultural, faith-based and genre programming built explicitly as a feeder for larger franchises.

The wager is less about any single title than about whether a legacy broadcaster can use a format built for scrolling — episodes typically run a minute or two — to find ideas worth stretching into forty-two-minute network episodes or ninety-minute films, at a fraction of the cost of commissioning a pilot outright. Industry observers covering the deal tied it to the broader growth of mobile-first storytelling, which has drawn an increasing number of major studios and established media brands into a space once dominated by small, China-rooted app developers.

For now, the near-term test is simpler: whether the 20-million-plus combined following of Codeblack, Essence and Revolt is enough to make the new My Drama channel a destination in its own right, and whether any of the 25 launch titles generates the kind of engagement data that persuades Fox Entertainment Studios to greenlight a full-length successor. Neither company has said when viewers will see the first title or how success will be measured beyond internal viewership and completion data gathered on the My Drama app itself.

The arrangement also marks a notable expansion for Codeblack, which Clanagan built as a standalone film and television label focused on Black audiences before folding it into Hartbeat, and for Essence and Revolt, both long-established culture brands that have not previously had a dedicated scripted-video channel of their own. Housing all three inside a single branded destination on My Drama gives Fox and Hartbeat a shared audience to point to as they pitch advertisers and, eventually, the broadcast and streaming executives who would greenlight any television or film adaptation that emerges from the slate.